Strange Innocence: "Aquí nace la inocencia" by Luisa Valenzuela

Abstract

Strange Innocence:"Aquí nace la inocencia" by Luisa Valenzuela Diane E. Marting It wasn't people that disappeared, but subversives. Personally, I never killed a child; what I did was to hand over some of them to charitable organizations so that they could be given new parents. Subversive parents educate their children for subversion. This has to be stopped. Interview with General Ramon Camps (1983)1 In her essay "The Corpus Delicti," Josefina Ludmer argues that Argentine literature and Latin American literature in general is characterized by classic fictions about crimes of the state—a special kind of crime fiction.2 Fictions about crimes of the state do abound in Latin America—hence Ludmer's term 'classic'—although all kinds of crime fiction clearly exist in the region.3 Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela has written about her country's crimes in the 1970s and 1980s in many of her works, especially in Cambio de armas (1982), Cola de lagartija (1983), and the well-known stories from 1975, "Los mejor calzados" and "Aquí pasan cosas raras," among other works. In this essay I argue that a neglected short story by Valenzuela, "Aquí nace la inocencia" is another of her fictions that speaks of the criminal state and mirrors the state's perversion of ideas about truth and justice. Strangeness characterizes most of the stories in Aquí pasan cosas raras: bizarre behaviors, odd happenstance, weird desires, unusual settings, and ironic developments of plot and politics entertain and disconcert the reader. In a new foreword in 1991, Valenzuela reported that her return to Argentina the year prior to writing the 1975 collection had inspired her: "Así nació Aquí pasan cosas raras, llevándome de sorpresa en sorpresa" (5).4 Valenzuela explains further: [S]upe casi de inmediato que el Buenos Aires del momento nada tenía que ver con el que yo había dejado casi tres años antes. De golpe se había roto la legendaria calma de nuestra ciudad. La surcaban las oscuras fuerzas de la violencia, todo auto que pasaba podía ser una amenaza, todo paquete una bomba, los cafés eran sitios de sospecha y delación. Entre lo que la gente [End Page 117] relataba y lo que se veía en las calles se iba entretejiendo una red de locura que fue cerrando su malla hasta oprimirnos de tal forma que era difícil reconocer lo que en verdad ocurría. (5) A reporter by trade at the time, Valenzuela noticed the growth of ferocious, extra-legal acts of violence upon her return from living abroad in Mexico, Paris, and Barcelona. But at the same time, she knew she could not write directly and openly about the violence and hope to be published or even to survive. While writing with concrete and real-world detail, Valenzuela hides the meanings of these stories from anyone not aware of the context, as she explains in the third edition of the stories: Después de publicados entendí que estos cuentos, esencialmente realistas, usan las máscaras del humor negro, el grotesco o el hiperrealismo para eludir las censuras que en casos como el que sufríamos entonces los argentinos puede llegar a ser tan triple como la A desencadenada del terror. ("Presentación" 6) The Triple A, or Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, was an extremist, ultraconservative terrorist group under the control of José López Rega, the infamous member of the inner circle of two Argentine Presidents: Juan Domingo Perón and later Isabel Perón, his widow. Ironically, López Rega, the leader of a paramilitary torture and execution squads, blazoned the official title of Ministro de Bienestar Social. López Rega's power over the Peróns—and Argentina—was the greatest from 1973–1976 through his organization, which is credited with over seven hundred murders and various other crimes (Jansen González). The story I am analyzing here was composed prior to the coup d'état of the dictatorship in 1976 during the Presidency of Isabel Perón and López Rega's ascendency to full power. The activities of his reign of terror were still largely covert. Rita Arditti writes that "the sinister Argentina Anticommunist...